I have learned silence from the talkative, toleration from the intolerant, and kindness from the unkind; yet, strange, I am ungrateful to those teachers.
Learned
I’ve learned any fool can write a bad ad, but it takes a real genius to keep his hands off a good one.
I was what? – twelve years old – and I was thrown in the cells with these people, so I learned fast.
I didn’t learn much about writing at Sarah Lawrence, but I learned a lot about the sources of poems – dreams, myth, history – from the really great teachers, Joseph Campbell, Charles Trinkhaus, Bert Loewenberg, and a young Australian anthropologist named Harry Hawthorne.
On 11 September, I was living in Greenwich Village, New York; my children learned to tell south from north by looking at the World Trade Center.
Modesty is a learned affectation. And as soon as life slams the modest person against the wall, that modesty drops.
I’ve got to relearn what I was supposed to have learned.
In the depth of winter I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer.
I learned snails don’t have ears. They live in silence. They go slowly. Slowly, slowly in silence.
Eighty-five percent cannot read when they enter the security forces of Afghanistan. Why? Because the Taliban withheld education during the period of time in which these men and women would have learned to read.